Speaker 1: Imagine, imagine if you will, standing in the suffocating darkness
of a tomb.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, setting the scene.
Speaker 1: Immediately, I have to You're in this tomb, right and
it has been sealed shut for thousands of.
Speaker 2: Years, just absolute, profound silence.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The air is stale, it's thick with the dust
of antiquity. You are completely surrounded by the ancient world.
And right above the grand stone entrance, curved deeply into
the rock face, is.
Speaker 2: A warning, a very clear warning.
Speaker 1: Very clear. It is a promise of complete and utter
ruin to absolutely anyone who dares disturb the piece within.
Speaker 2: And you see it, you read it.
Speaker 1: You read it, and yet human curiosity just pushes you
forward anyway. Or uh, let's bring the scenario.
Speaker 2: Much closer to home, into the living room.
Speaker 1: Right into the living room. Imagine you are sitting on
your couch. You're scrolling online late at night, and you
buy a mundane, slightly quirky oil painting to fill an
empty space on your wall.
Speaker 2: We've all done it, just looking for some decor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you hang it up, but almost immediately lee
your life begins to unravel into unmitigated, inexplicable chaos.
Speaker 2: The shadows start moving exactly.
Speaker 1: You hear whispers in the hallway, you see things out
of the corner of your eye. Tragedy strikes your family out.
Speaker 2: Of nowhere, which begs the question it.
Speaker 1: Does is it just a string of terrible, profound bad
luck or is there an invisible, malevolent force at play
in the world. Welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm so glad
you're joining us today.
Speaker 2: It is a really dark, yet deeply revealing journey we
have ahead of us today.
Speaker 1: It really is the.
Speaker 2: Narratives we're exploring touch on fears that have really plagued
humanity since we first learned to tell stories around a fire.
Speaker 1: They really do. So today's mission is based on a
truly fascinating video essay we've.
Speaker 2: Been reviewing, a really comprehensive one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's this great historicalisticle detailing the top ten creepiest
alleged curses and recorded history, along with a few very
notable honorable mentions.
Speaker 2: So we aren't just summarizing it.
Speaker 1: No, definitely not. Our goal on this episode of Thrilling
Threads isn't just to sit here and recite scary stories
to you. We want to understand why these legends endure
across generation.
Speaker 2: Why we need them essentially?
Speaker 1: Right? Why do we cling so desperately to the idea
of the curse object or the doomed bloodline? Okay, let's
unpack this. Because I have always had a sheer, unabashed
enthusiasm for the macabre and the mysterious.
Speaker 2: That's very true about you.
Speaker 1: I can't help it to me. It seems like curses
are humanity's way of making sense of random, senseless tragedy.
When terrible things happen, we want someone or something to blame,
and a curse provides a very convenient scapegoat.
Speaker 2: I would actually push back on the idea that they
are merely convenient.
Speaker 1: Scapegoats though, Oh really, how so?
Speaker 2: While they certainly serve that psychological function, the patterns hiding
behind these stories are far more complex. When you strip
away the supernatural veneer of the video essays countdown, you
find that these curses are almost always rooted in universal,
often really uncomfortable, human experiences like.
Speaker 1: What kind of experiences?
Speaker 2: Things like unchecked greed, profound guilt, and the violation of
what we deem to be sacred. Oh I see, Yeah,
The act is a mirror reflecting our own deepest cultural
and personal anxieties. It is less about finding a scapegoat
and more about attempting to enforce a moral order on
an indifferent universe.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, that is a much heavier way to look
at it, but I totally see your point. We are
basically trying to invent rules for a chaotic world exactly.
Speaker 2: We want the bad things to happen for a reason.
Speaker 1: Right, And before we get into the heavy historical stuff,
I want to ask you the listener, a direct question.
Speaker 2: Think about your own home for a second.
Speaker 1: Yes, have you ever owned an object that just felt
I don't know, wrong, just off Maybe something you picked
up at a dusty flea market, or an old piece
of furniture passed down from a distant relative, and every
time you walked past it, the hairs on the back
of your neck just stood.
Speaker 2: Up a visceral reaction.
Speaker 1: Keep that feeling in mind, that distinct, unsettled intuition. Hold
onto that as we begin to unravel these threads. Because
we're starting our journey not in ancient crypts or ruined temples.
Speaker 2: No, we are starting right in the modern living room.
Speaker 1: We really are.
Speaker 2: We are entering what I categorize as the uncanny Valley
of domestic life.
Speaker 1: The uncanny valley I like that term.
Speaker 2: It's the realm where the most ordinary, everyday items inexplicably
become vessels for our deepest, most primal fears. There is
a unique, specific horror in an object of comfort turning
against you within the supposed safety of your own home.
Speaker 1: And nothing represents comfort turning to tear quite like a
childhood toy. Let's talk about the Curse of Annabel, a classic. Now,
thanks to the massive influence of Hollywood, a lot of
people picture Annabel as this terrifying, cracked porcelain Victorian doll with.
Speaker 2: The glowing eyes and the sinister smile, right.
Speaker 1: But according to our source material, the reality is arguably
far more unsettling, because the real Annabel was a seemingly normal,
entirely mundane, raggedy doll, just cloth and yarn, just a
simple mass produced cloth toy with red yarn for hair
and a painted on smile. But this specific doll was
investigated by the famous paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine.
Speaker 2: Warren, and the Warren's involvement is really what catapulted this
specific cloth doll into the realm of legend.
Speaker 1: They took it very seriously, didn't they.
Speaker 2: They did. They claimed that moving Annabelle was an action
they did not take lightly at all, treating it with
the kind of caution one might reserve for a live explosive.
Speaker 1: A live explosive, that's wild. So how did they even
get it?
Speaker 2: The doll was originally given to them after its first owner,
who was a nursing student, experienced an escalating series of
terrifying events, and it started small, very subtle. The initial
reports were seemingly small things. The owner claimed the doll
could move entirely by itself, shifting positions on a bed
or appearing in different.
Speaker 1: Rooms, which is creepy enough on its own.
Speaker 2: But the narrative quickly pivots from subtle movement to distinct malice.
Speaker 1: It escalates so fast. You have a simple cloth doll,
a toy design to bring comfort to a child, but
then intense psychological and physical trauma starts befalling people connected
to it.
Speaker 2: The nightmare story is the one that really stands out.
Speaker 1: Yes, one of the most chilling details from the source
text involves the boyfriend of the nurse who owned the doll.
He falls asleep on the couch one night and has
this vivid, suffocating nightmare about the doll physically crawling up
his legs and attacking him.
Speaker 2: It's terrifying.
Speaker 1: We need to pause and think about how relatable and
primal that fear is. Dolls are inherently creepy, precisely because
they mimic humanity, but they lack a soul.
Speaker 2: They are an empty vessel.
Speaker 1: Right they sit there on the shelf with those dead,
unblinking eyes. To dream of one animating, crossing the room
and physically attacking you, it's pure distilled nightmare fuel.
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is the trajectory of that nightmare.
Speaker 1: How do you mean?
Speaker 2: Well, it didn't remain a bad dream locked within the
confines of a sleeping mind. According to the accounts in
the Countdown, this supposedly demon possessed dull crossed the boundary
from psychological terror into tangible physical reality.
Speaker 1: Oh right, the physical attacks exactly.
Speaker 2: It allegedly slashed its victims, leaving physical marks on their bodies.
Speaker 1: Just writing that off as a scratch from a pet
wouldn't work if you literally see it happen, And it.
Speaker 2: Went as far as actually stabbing a homicide detective.
Speaker 1: That is the both that gets me. Let's focus on
that detective for a second. Imagine you are a homicide detective.
Speaker 2: You are grounded entirely in the material world.
Speaker 1: You see the absolute worst of humanity every single day.
Your entire career is grounded in physical evidence, blood spatter,
clear motives, logical deductions.
Speaker 2: Cold hard facts.
Speaker 1: So to have a hardened investigator allegedly attacked and stabbed
by a mass produced child's toy, what does that do
to a person's worldview? The cognitive dissonance must be absolutely staggering.
Speaker 2: It completely shatters the framework of logic that a detective
relies able to function. It has to, and regardless of
what one believes about the objective truth of the Warren's
claims or the detective's experience, the cultural impact of this
narrative is undeniable. A simple cloth toy evolved into a massive,
highly lucrative Hollywood horror franchise, We Really Did It, inspired
the Conjuring series, and branched off into its own entire
horror trilogy, generating millions of dollars.
Speaker 1: It totally blurred the lines between alleged true crime, paranormal investigation,
and blockbuster entertainment. We took a story about profound domestic
terror and turned it into popcorn fodder.
Speaker 2: We commercialized the fear exactly.
Speaker 1: And speaking of domestic items that take on a dark
life of their own, we have to talk about the
infamous eBay haunted.
Speaker 2: Painting ah The Hands Resist Him.
Speaker 1: Yes, the official title of the piece is The Hands
Resist Him, and it was painted in nineteen seventy two
by an oil painter named Bill Stoneham.
Speaker 2: The timeline of this object's notoriety is really crucial to.
Speaker 1: Understand here right because it wasn't famous right.
Speaker 2: Away, not at all. The piece did not gain its
infamous cursted reputation immediately upon its creation in the nineteen seventies.
It wasn't until the year two thousand, when it was
listed in an online eBay auction, that the cursed narrative
truly exploded into the public consciousness.
Speaker 1: I have to laugh just thinking about the wild West
early days of eBay. It was completely unregulated, the Internet
was still relatively young, and the site was primarily characterized
by just how bizarre the listings were. People were selling
grilled cheese sandwiches with the face of religious figures burned
into them.
Speaker 2: It was a digital garage sale for the bizarre.
Speaker 1: A total free for all, especially when it came to
the supernatural. But the backstory of this specific painting is
deeply unsettling.
Speaker 2: Because of the gallery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, before it ever reached the Internet, it was initially
displayed in the prestigious Finegarten gallery in Beverly Hills, and
within a year of it being shown there, both the
owner of the gallery and the art critic who reviewed
the painting were dead.
Speaker 2: The suddenness of those deaths is really the foundational seed
of the cursed narrative, just a coincidence, a coincidence perhaps,
but human nature abhors a coincidence when mortality is involved.
We need a reason we do.
Speaker 1: And after those initial tragedies, the painting eventually made its
way into the possession of the renowned actor John Marley.
Speaker 2: From The Godfather fame exactly.
Speaker 1: He held on to it for a time, but following
his death, the painting completely disappeared, just vanished, vanished from
the wealthy, prestigious circles of Beverly Hills, and eventually resurfaced
in the most unlikely and atmospheric of places, an abandoned brewery,
an abandoned brewery. It's like a horror movie writing itself.
Speaker 2: It really is perfect framing.
Speaker 1: Imagine exploring a decaying industrial building surrounded by rusted metal
and broken glass and finding a pristine oil painting hidden
in the debris. A couple discovers it there, decides to
bring it into their home, and within just a few
days they become totally unnerved by odd occurrences.
Speaker 2: At night, specifically involving their daughter.
Speaker 1: Right their young daughdo starts complaining about the painting, claiming
she is terrified of it, and the imagery of the
painting itself is already eerie.
Speaker 2: It is deeply unsettling art.
Speaker 1: It features a young boy staring forward and next to
him is a life sized female doll with vacant eyes,
and behind them, disembodied hands are pressing against a glass door.
Speaker 2: Just esthetically, it's meant to provoke anxiety, and.
Speaker 1: The couple's claim was that at night, the figures in
the canvas would actually move.
Speaker 2: The specifics of those alleged movements are what elevate the
story from a creepy anecdote to a full blown supernatural thriller.
Speaker 1: What were they doing?
Speaker 2: The female doll would allegedly brandish a gun a gun, yes,
introducing an element of active lethal threat, and the little
boy in the painting would literally attempt to escape the
canvas and flee into the real world.
Speaker 1: Think about the visceral terror of that. A static image,
something you literally nail to your wall to simply look at,
suddenly chain jing its physical composition when you turn off
the living room lights.
Speaker 2: It defies logic.
Speaker 1: You buy art to enhance your home, to bring beauty
or thought into your space. For that art to suddenly
become a window for a tiny, armed nightmare to enter
your reality, it breaks every rule of how the physical
world is supposed to work.
Speaker 2: It illustrates the psychological impact of art in a fascinating way.
Art is fundamentally meant to evoke emotion. Sure, it is
a one way communication from the artist to the viewer,
but in this case, a medium design for passive aesthetic
appreciation becomes an active engine of terror.
Speaker 1: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 2: When the subjects of a painting are said to break
the boundaries of their frame, it violates our fundamental understanding
of physics. We expect domestic objects to be entirely passive.
When they become active agents of fear. Our sense of
safety within our own homes is completely shattered.
Speaker 1: Which transitions us perfectly to a curse that didn't just
shatter the peace of one or two homes, but caused
a literal nationwide panic crying. I am talking about the
blazing curse of the crying Boy. Let's set the scene
for you.
Speaker 2: Take us back.
Speaker 1: It's the United Kingdom in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
There is a string of devastating, catastrophic house fires across
the country. Homes are being burned to the ground, lives.
Speaker 2: Are being ruined and terrible tragedy.
Speaker 1: But fire investigators start noticing one incredibly spooky, recurring detail.
In the charred ashes and smoking rubble of these destroyed homes,
one single item keeps surviving, perfectly.
Speaker 2: Intact, completely untouched by the flames.
Speaker 1: A mass produced nineteen fifties painting by Italian artist Giovanni Bruggelin,
depicting a young boy with heavy tears streaming down his face.
Speaker 2: The visual contrast described in the historical accounts is astounding.
The surrounding house is reduced to blackened wood and gray ash.
Entire lifetimes of possessions incinerated yet the portrait remains untouched,
resisting the flames entirely.
Speaker 1: It defies explanation.
Speaker 2: Well as the source of material notes. One investigator acts
commented that it was almost as if the painting had
been coated in some highly effective fire resistant substance.
Speaker 1: Oh so a logical explanation, that.
Speaker 2: Is, the logical material explanation, But for the general public,
rational explanations were entirely overshadowed by the sheer, eerie repetition
of the phenomena.
Speaker 1: Imagine being a homeowner standing in the smoking ruins of
your family home. Everything you own, all your memories, your photographs,
your clothing, just destroyed, devastating, and as you sift through
the warm ashes, you look down and see this perfectly pristine,
weeping child's face just staring back at you. It would
feel like a deliberate, cruel taunt from the universe.
Speaker 2: And this is exactly where the dynamic of mass hysteria
comes into play, a sterea that was heavily amplified and
capitalized upon by the media.
Speaker 1: The tabloids got involved.
Speaker 2: Specifically, the British tabloid newspaper The Sun seized upon this
spooky coincidence. Yeah, they didn't just report on the fires.
Speaker 1: Why did they do?
Speaker 2: They actively organized mass bonfires for people to bring their
crime boy painting and destroy them in public squares.
Speaker 1: Are you serious mass bonfires?
Speaker 2: Yes? This is a profound moment of collective psychology. Think
about it, A modern industrialized twentieth century society engaging in
a literal, communal purging ritual.
Speaker 1: That is wild.
Speaker 2: They were holding which trial style bonfires to destroy a
mass produced piece of kitsch art, driven entirely by a
tabloid frenzy.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can hear the rationalization now, I'm not
taking any chances, would you? That was the prevailing sentiment.
People were terrified that hanging this cheap print on their
wall was an invitation for an inferno.
Speaker 2: Better safe than sorry, even if it defies logic exactly.
Speaker 1: But you know, while these domestic objects, the raggedy doll,
the eBay painting, the weeping boy print seemed to target
and punish individuals or specific families, other curses operate on
a much grander geopolitical.
Speaker 2: Scale, moving from the home to the empire.
Speaker 1: Yes, some curses seem designed to punish entire empires and
bloodlines for the sin of unchecked greed.
Speaker 2: We are indeed shifting from the domestic sphere to the
grand stage of human history. We are going to explore
how curses function as a mythical defense mechanism against the
theft of the sacred or the violent plundering of incredibly valuable.
Speaker 1: Resources, which brings us to the formidable, legendary curse of
the Aztec gold. Let's dive into the history here.
Speaker 2: This is a complex one.
Speaker 1: It is driven by an insatiable, overwhelming greed for the
undiscovered wealth of the New World. The conquistador Hernan Cortes
arrived at the spectacular, thriving as tech city of Tenoctelin.
Speaker 2: A massive advanced civilization.
Speaker 1: Initially, the historical record suggests it seemed like the start
of a diplomatic or at least amicable relationship. The Aztecs,
perhaps out of caution or custom, presented Cortes and his
men with lavish, unimaginable gifts of gold.
Speaker 2: A gesture of wealth and power.
Speaker 1: But rather than appeasing the Spaniards or opening a channel
of fair trade, these gifts only poured gasoline on the
fire of Cortes's greed. He saw a fraction of their
wealth and decided he wanted it all.
Speaker 2: The fatal flaw.
Speaker 1: Imprisoned the Aztec ruler Maktezuma, attempting to gain total authoritarian
control of the city and its vast riches. Ultimately, Cortes
invaded and destroyed the city, bringing about the bloody, devastating
downfall of the Aztec Empire, which was one of the greatest,
most advanced civilizations known in the world at that time.
Speaker 2: It is a period of history drenched in blood, betrayal,
and colonial violence.
Speaker 1: Deeply dark history.
Speaker 2: And according to the legend highlighted in our source, the
gold that Cortes lusted after so fervently did not come
without a severe metaphysical price, the curse. Yes. In retaliation
for the destruction of their entire civilization, the Aztecs are
said to have placed a powerful, lasting curse upon the
plundered gold. The treasure was allegedly hidden away by the
surviving Aztecs and eventually buried in what is now the
United States, and it's still out there to this very day.
Despite centuries of searching, it has still not been discovered.
Speaker 1: Before we talk about the ultimate fate of Cortes, I
want to make something very clear to you, the listener
We are looking at this purely through the lens of
the historical text provided by the.
Speaker 2: Countdown very important context.
Speaker 1: We are taking absolutely no sides in the political or
historical debates that still rage today regarding colonization. Our source
material notes that Cortes left behind a highly mixed legacy,
depending entirely on who you ask and what perspective of
history they champion.
Speaker 2: There are two very distinct views presented.
Speaker 1: Right to many Mexicans, he is still widely regarded as
a murderous villain who brought the devastating plague of western
colonization and disease to their sovereign lands. Conversely, to the Spanish,
he is often viewed as an important historical figure who
expanded their territory and helped their empire reach the pinnacle
of its global power. We are merely reporting the text
perspective on his deeply polarized, controversial legacy.
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, the curse
aspect reveals itself most clearly in Cortez's ultimate personal fate.
Speaker 1: What actually happened to him.
Speaker 2: Conquering an entire empire for its unimaginable wealth, despite tearing
down a civilization to fill the coffers of Spain. Cortezwin
completely broke.
Speaker 1: Wow all that gold, and he ended up broke.
Speaker 2: He begrudgingly returned to the Americas later in life to
seek his fortune once again, desperate to reclaim his former glory,
but ultimately died entirely penniless. Yeah, and he did not
die peacefully. The text notes he suffered from painful afflictions
like dysentery and plorisy.
Speaker 1: I think we need to explain what that actually means physically,
because it is grim. Dysentery is horrific enough of violent
intestinal disease, but plurisy it's agonizing for those who might
not know. Plurisy is a condition where the tissues that
line your lungs and chest cavity become severely inflamed. It
makes every single breath feel like a sharp, stabbing agony
in your chest.
Speaker 2: You literally cannot breathe without profound pain.
Speaker 1: So he conquered the world for gold, destroyed millions of lives,
and died broke, sick and gasping for air in immense agony.
It feels like the universe balancing the scales.
Speaker 2: I would actually push back on calling get the universe
balancing the scales.
Speaker 1: Oh, you don't think so.
Speaker 2: We have to ask ourselves if that is a cosmic
magical force at work or just the inevitable downfall of
an empire builder who overextended his reach, alienated his allies,
and succumbed to the medical realities of his era.
Speaker 1: The logical explanation again.
Speaker 2: People love the curse narrative because it applies a neat
moral framework to messy geopolitical realities. The curse of the
Aztec Gold isn't necessarily about magical incantations spoken over a
pile of coins, and what is it? It serves as
the ultimate narrative revenge. It is the concept of karmic
retribution made manifest in storytelling. A destroyed civilization gets the final,
lasting victory in the historical narrative against a greedy conqueror.
Speaker 1: Oh, I love that the gold remains hidden from his
empire and the conqueror dies with nothing.
Speaker 2: The narrative revenge outlasts the physical empire.
Speaker 1: That is profound, and it ties directly into another legendary
curse of ad antiquity, one that also involves immense wealth
and the violation of sacred spaces. Yes, the curse of
King Tutsiquomen's tomb. For hundreds of years, scientists, archaeologists, and
ruthless grave roppers disturbed the resting places of ancient Egyptians,
seemingly completely ignorant of or just uncaring about, the explicit
warnings carved into the stone.
Speaker 2: The hubris is staggering.
Speaker 1: It is. The text notes that there is a specific
curse reserved only for the most evil of blasphemers who
disturbed the dead, and no tomb was as perfectly preserved
or brought on as much alleged misfortune as.
Speaker 2: King tuts The timeline of this specific curse is what
propelled it from local superstition into the global consciousness.
Speaker 1: How quickly did it happen?
Speaker 2: Very quickly. The burial chamber of King Tutana Kaman, untouched
for millennia, was famously opened in November of nineteen twenty two.
By January of nineteen twenty four, just a little over
a year later, three men intimately involved in the excavation
process were already dead.
Speaker 1: The warning above the door it's the oldest cinematic trope
in the book. And these highly educated, incredibly wealthy excavators
just marched right past it with their lanterns and their notebooks.
Speaker 2: Arrogance masked de science, and the.
Speaker 1: Curse didn't just affect the laborers or the local workers.
It went right to the top of the aristocratic food.
Speaker 2: Chain, the financiers.
Speaker 1: Yes, the first major victim was the wealthy earl who
actually financed the entire expedition. And how did this incredibly wealthy,
powerful man who survived the harsh desert environment actually.
Speaker 2: Die a mosquito bite?
Speaker 1: A mosquito bite. He was bitten by mosquito. The bite
became infected and it led to fatal blood poisoning. A
tiny insect took down the man who funded the plunder
of a Faroh, it's incredibly mundane, and over the next
few years a number of others connected to the dig
followed him to the grave, with the curse supposedly claiming
its final ultimate victim in Howard Carter himself, the expedition lader,
the very man who physically broke the seal and opened
the tomb.
Speaker 2: We must consider the intense cultural and media context.
Speaker 1: Of that era, the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2: Yes, the discovery of King TuS Mummy launched an unprecedented
massive international media frenzy. It made front page headlines in
every major newspaper across the globe.
Speaker 1: It was basically the biggest story in the world.
Speaker 2: The world was captivated by the goal, the history, the mystery.
When you have an event of that magnitude, any subsequent misfortune,
even a mundane infection from a mosquito, is going to
be magnified and scrutinized through a lens of superstition.
Speaker 1: Especially when it comes to grave robbing.
Speaker 2: Right. Disturbing the dead for fame and profit is an ancient,
deeply ingrained human taboo. When the media needed to keep
the momentum of the story going after the initial excitement
of the discovery faded, the sudden deaths of the wealthy
financiers provided the perfect fuel.
Speaker 1: So the curse was basically good for business.
Speaker 2: Exactly the narrative of the curse actually sustained the global interest,
intertwining ancient Egyptian mysticism with the modern nineteen twenties news cycle.
Speaker 1: They needed a reason why these seemingly untouchable, wealthy upper
class explorers were dropping dead. A mosquito bite is boring.
A pharaoh's ancient curse sells papers.
Speaker 2: It creates a mythological narrative.
Speaker 1: And speaking of the wealthy facing unimaginable tragedy. Here's where
it gets really interesting. Let's examine the Hope Diamond.
Speaker 2: Ah, another legendary artifact.
Speaker 1: This isn't just a cursed tomb anchored in the desert.
It's a cursed, highly mobile object that has been passed
from hand to hand, continent to continent for centuries, a
traveling curse. The story starts in a deep Indian mine
in the sixteen hundreds, and supposedly a dark, heavy curse
has followed anyone greedy enough or arrogant enough to possess
this enormous, mesmerizing blue gem.
Speaker 2: Its early history is explicitly described in the text as
spotty and deeply bloodstained.
Speaker 1: Blood stained is right.
Speaker 2: The chain of possession reads less like a ledger of
wealth and more like a catalog of horrific, gruesome fates.
Speaker 1: Give me an example.
Speaker 2: The first recorded European owner, a man named Tavernier, was
supposedly stricken with a terrible fatal fever shortly after obtaining
the gem, dying far from home.
Speaker 1: And it only gets more gruesome from there. We have
a report and the source of one man who briefly possessed,
the diamond being literally torn apart by dogs just brutal.
Think about the sheer violence of that death. Eventually, the
diamond makes its upward climb into the very pinnacle of
global wealth.
Speaker 2: And power, the French crown.
Speaker 1: The stone is passed down through the monarchy until it
rests with King Louis the sixteenth and his wife Marie Antoinette.
And we all know the history there revolution. The French
monarchy was obliterated by revolution, and both the king and
queen were publicly violently beheaded via the guillotine. The diamond,
representing all their hoarded wealth, was stolen during the chaos
of the revolution and eventually recut to hide its identity.
Speaker 2: Yet the tragedies continue to follow the stone regardless of
its shape.
Speaker 1: It didn't matter that it looked different.
Speaker 2: Not at all. Lord Francis Hope, the man whose name
the diamond now bears, suffered a complete reversal of fortune
and went entirely bankrupt, forced to sell his.
Speaker 1: Assets, so it ruined him financially.
Speaker 2: And physically for others, a later owner reportedly drowned in
a tragic shipwreck. The diamond allegedly moved through the hands
of multiple rulers and socialites, seeing entire royal lines and
wealthy families come to abrupt, tragic and often violent.
Speaker 1: Ends, until it finally comes to rest where it is today,
displayed behind bulletproof glass at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
d C. A public display and the public reaction to
the Smithsonian acquiring it is what I find so fascinating.
Some Americans legitimately wondered if bringing this massive, blood soaked
diamond into the Capitol was a good idea for the country.
Speaker 2: They were genuinely afraid.
Speaker 1: Museum leaders actually received numerous frantic, terrified letters from citizens
begging them to reject the diamond, convinced that bringing it
to American soil would cause a catastrophic disaster for the
entire nation. National supers and those public fears weren't exactly
quieted when reports started circulating about the terrible immediate misfortunes
of a man known as Postman.
Speaker 2: Todd, the man who delivered it.
Speaker 1: Yes, the actual mail carrier who was tasked with delivering
the diamond to the museum suffered a string of terrible
luck right after dropping it off.
Speaker 2: This specific narrative provides a brilliant revealing lens into how
society views extreme concentrated wealth. How So, extreme wealth and
political power inevitably bring extreme isolation, volatile political turmoil, and
often sudden tragic downfalls. We see a monarch beheaded in
a violent revolution, or a wealthy lord go completely bankrupt
due to poor investments and shifting economies, as we blame
the rock exactly, rather than attribute those events to the natural,
volatile consequences of human power structures and societal inequality, we
label it a curse. It is psychologically easier for the
public to blame a glowing, magical blue rock than to
confront the fragile, often brutal, and unstable nature of economics
and politics.
Speaker 1: That is such a short point. Blaming the blue rock
is so much easier than analyzing the socioeconomic factors that
lead to a bloody revolution.
Speaker 2: It simplifies the chaos.
Speaker 1: And before we move on from the ancient world and
ancient artifacts entirely, we have a quick, honorable mention from
our source material that perfectly ties these historical themes together.
Speaker 2: The Iceman, the Curse of Atsi.
Speaker 1: The Iceman. This is a five thy three hundred year
old mummy, a man who is brutally murdered in the
Alps with an arrow to the back, who seemingly took
revenge on the modern researchers and hikers who discovered him.
Speaker 2: The Iceman case is only briefly mentioned in the Countdown,
but it acts as a perfect modern parallel to the
King Tatankamo narrative in what way our source text describes
it as a text bookcase of a dark ritual and
a violent death leading to a restless spirit stalking and
punishing those who disturb its remains in the modern.
Speaker 1: Era right because the people who found him didn't fare
too well.
Speaker 2: Several people associated with finding and steadying Atzi diet in
subsequent accidents. Whether it is a revered pharaoh resting in
a golden sarcophagus or a murdered anonymous man frozen in
a glacier, humanity harbors a deep seated, unshakable belief that
profound violence leads an indelible, dangerous stain on the physical world, a.
Speaker 1: Dark stain that refuses to be washed away no matter
how much time passes.
Speaker 2: Precisely, but you know.
Speaker 1: We don't just see this phenomenon in ancient history or
among royal European bloodlines. We also see it in the
modern equivalent of.
Speaker 2: Royalty celebrity culture.
Speaker 1: Yes, we're moving from the ancient pursuit of gold and
glory to the modern pursuit of fame and exploring how
the spotlight itself might just be cursed. Let's talk about
the spectacle of tragedy in Hollywood, on the stage and
in the realm of modern superstition.
Speaker 2: The public facing figures of our era, the movie stars,
the politicians, the elite athletes, become massive magnets for cursed
narratives whenever sudden tragedy strikes them in the public eye.
Speaker 1: Because they feel larger than life.
Speaker 2: Because their lives are so visible, their deaths require a
larger than life explanation.
Speaker 1: And there is perhaps no greater more mythologized tragedy in
early Hollywood than the death of James Dean and the
subsequent curse of the Little Bastard.
Speaker 2: An iconic American tragedy.
Speaker 1: On September thirtieth, nineteen fifty five, James Dean, who was
a rapidly rising, incredibly charismatic Hollywood star the poster boy
for teenage rebellion, was killed in a horrific car crash.
Speaker 2: So young too.
Speaker 1: He was only twenty four years old, an entire life,
an entire legendary career, cut short in a split second.
He was driving his brand new silver Porsche of five
point fifty, a beautiful machine that had the words little
Bastard painted right on the rear.
Speaker 2: The details of the crash are quite heroin.
Speaker 1: According to the accounts in the source, Dean was driving
at speeds of ninety miles per hour, aggressively passing cars
along the highway. To any onlookers, it must have looked
like a silver rocket flying down the road right up
until the devastating impact.
Speaker 2: The sudden, violent death of such a young, vibrant cultural
icon was a massive shock to the American public.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the grief was palpable, But the story didn't end
with the crash.
Speaker 2: No. What elevates this event from a tragic, reckless accident
to a legendary curse is what allegedly happened after the crash.
The tragedy connected to the metal of the Little Bastard
was far from over.
Speaker 1: It's like the car itself became infected with his death,
like the metal absorbed the trauma of the impact.
Speaker 2: That's a very evocative way to put it.
Speaker 1: For example, while the mangled, crushed wreckage of the Porsche
is being stored in a garage, a fire suddenly broke out,
severely damaging the garage without any logical or identified explanation
spontaneous fire. But the scariest part, the part that truly
cements the curse, is what happened when the ruined car
was parted out. Pieces of the Little Bastard were sold off,
repurposed and put into other vehicles, and those specific parts
seemingly wreaks lethal havoc wherever they went.
Speaker 2: The source notes that severe injury and even death befill
the subsequent drivers who used pieces repurposed from Dean's car,
like the engine.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Yes. Doctor William Estrich, for instance, used the engine from
the Little Bastard into his own racing car and subsequently
got into a severe crippling accident. I analyzed this as
a sort of intense psychological contagent effect.
Speaker 1: It's a mechanical virus.
Speaker 2: Exactly, well, perhaps not a literal virus, but a narrative one.
Speaker 1: The story that spreads.
Speaker 2: The car's aura of death born from the trauma of
a highly publicized, deeply mourned crash seemingly infected the perception
of other vehicles.
Speaker 1: We project the tragedy onto the machine.
Speaker 2: We want the car to be evil because the alternative
is accepting that a talented young man simply made a
fatal mistake regarding his speed.
Speaker 1: It's easier to blame a haunted car than a reckless choice.
Speaker 2: And the story concludes with the ultimate mythical disappearing act.
Speaker 1: Oh, this is the best part.
Speaker 2: Five years after James Dean's death, while being transported, the
remnants of the Little Bastard vanished without a single trace,
just gone. The car remains completely missing to this very day,
allowing it to transition perfectly from physical evidence into an
untouchable myth.
Speaker 1: It is the ultimate ghost story for the American automobile age,
a haunted machine that vanishes into the fog.
Speaker 2: Very politic.
Speaker 1: Now, staying in the realm of Hollywood, we have to
look at a curse that is deeply unsettling because it
involves the actual creation of a piece of horror media.
I am talking about the Poltergeist Curse.
Speaker 2: A notorious Hollywood legend.
Speaker 1: This film franchise is a massive staple for horror fans,
focusing on a suburban family plagued by malevolent spirits after
moving into a tract home built over a burial ground.
They're here.
Speaker 2: It's an iconic piece of cinema.
Speaker 1: But the film has a notoriously dark, devastating legacy off screen,
and honestly, the inciting incident for this curse genuinely horrifies me.
The prop skeletons, according to the countdown. To save money
on the production budget, the filmmakers used actual, real human
skeletons as props in The Muddy Pors.
Speaker 2: This raises an important question regarding the ethical boundaries in
the creation of art and how those breaches of ethics
are perceived by the public.
Speaker 1: It's so hypocritical too, how so well, the film itself
contains explicit themes that are highly critical of treating human
remains disrespectfully. The entire plot hinges on a greedy real
estate developer refusing to move the bodies in a cemetery.
Speaker 2: Yes, the narrative condemns the very action the production took, Yet.
Speaker 1: The production allegedly engaged in that exact practice just to
save a few dollars.
Speaker 2: This profound disrespect for the dead led many fans and
observers to firmly believe that the film set was genuinely cursed.
They drew a direct supernatural line between the use of
those real skeletons and the tragic, untimely deaths of two
of the film's young stars.
Speaker 1: We really need to pause and acknowledge the overwhelming sadness
of those deaths, because it is heartbreaking.
Speaker 2: It truly is.
Speaker 1: Heather O'Rourke, the angelic little girl who appeared in all
three Poltergeist films, the face of the franchise, died at
the incredibly young age of twelve from cardiac arrest just
four months before the final film's release.
Speaker 2: A twelve year old suffering cardiac arrest is a profound,
unfathomable tragedy. It is the kind of event that breaks
a community.
Speaker 1: And then you have Dominie Dunn, who played the teenage
sister in the original movie. She was brutally murdered strangled
by her ex boyfriend just months after the initial film premiered.
Speaker 2: The sheer weight of that grief is suffocating.
Speaker 1: When you hear about sequential, horrific tragedies striking young women
associated with a horror film, it's so hard not to
look for a supernatural reason to believe that a line
was crossed with those real skeletons that invited a dark,
retaliatory energy into their lives.
Speaker 2: The human toll is devastating, but from an analytical perspective,
it forces us to ask, does violating the sacred, like
using real human remains for entertainment, invite a literal supernatural darkness?
Or is this simply human psychology desperately linking unrelated, horrific
and statistic tragic deaths to a movie that just happened
to be about ghosts and.
Speaker 1: Demons, desperately searching for a reason.
Speaker 2: Again, our brains are hardwired to find patterns, especially when
we are collectively grieving the senseless, unfair loss of young life.
If we can blame a curse, we don't have to
phase the terrifying randomness of medical emergencies or domestic violence.
Speaker 1: Pattern recognition as a coping mechanism in the face of
immense grief that makes so much sense, even if it's
incredibly bleak. Let's pivot to a different kind of performance, heart,
one with rules so strict and steeped in history that
breaking them is said to invite disaster. Ah the theater,
the curse of the Scottish play. We are talking, of course,
about William Shakespeare's.
Speaker 2: Macbeth, a tradition older than Hollywood by far.
Speaker 1: In the theater world, there are countless quirky superstitions. You
tell someone to break a leg instead of wishing them luck,
but uttering the actual name of this specific play under
the roof of a theater will draw immediate genuine fear
and ire from seasoned Thespians.
Speaker 2: Tradition strictly dictates that cast and crew must refer to
the work only as the Scottish play to avoid inevitable mishap, injury,
or financial disaster. The persistence of this superstition across centuries
is remarkable.
Speaker 1: I just love the deep, dramatic theatricality of this. The
alleged source of the curse.
Speaker 2: Is wild the Witches.
Speaker 1: Yes, it is attributed to actual witches who were supposedly
deeply displeased with Shakespeare's portrayal of their coven. The rumor
is that he used real, authentic dark incantations in the
dialogue of the play, angering actual practitioners of magic, and.
Speaker 2: The supposed consequences are severe.
Speaker 1: Because of this, a staggering list of calamities has been
attributed to the curse over the centuries. We're talking about
everything from multiple theater companies completely folding and going bankrupt,
to unexplained fires burning down stages.
Speaker 2: And injuries during the performances themselves.
Speaker 1: Right even accidental deaths caused by actors using real sharpened
daggers instead of props during performances. And the reach of
this curse isn't just historical, it is entirely modern too.
Speaker 2: The Oscars incident.
Speaker 1: According to our source, comedian Chris Rock allegedly triggered the
curse at the Dolby Theater during the Academy Awards, just
moments before he was infamously slapped on stage by Will Smith.
Speaker 2: The juxtaposition of ancient Elizabethan theatrical superstition being applied to
modern Hollywood celebrity drama is striking.
Speaker 1: It's surreal, But the.
Speaker 2: Psychology here is deeply rooted in the inherent nature of performance.
High stress environments where so much relies on exact timing,
fragile memory, and countless uncontrollable variables like lighting and audience
reaction naturally breed deep superstitions.
Speaker 1: Because anything could go wrong exactly.
Speaker 2: Actors are engaged in a high wire act every night.
Speaker 1: And the cure for saying the name is hilariously specific.
It is a full physical ritual.
Speaker 2: What is the exact process?
Speaker 1: If you are ever caught slipping up and saying the
title of the play inside a theater, you have to
physically run out of the building, spin around three times,
and then either spit on the ground or swear.
Speaker 2: Loudly, very dramatic.
Speaker 1: It's like a playground game, but performed by serious, classically
trained actors.
Speaker 2: While it sounds comical, it acts as a vital psychological
reset button.
Speaker 1: A reset button.
Speaker 2: Yes. By performing a physical, highly specific, and slightly ridiculous ritual,
the performer breaks the tension. They regain a sense of
active control over the uncontrollable anxieties and variables of live theater.
Speaker 1: They shake it off literally.
Speaker 2: The ritual banishes the fear, allowing them to return to
the stage completely focused.
Speaker 1: We do rituals to feel safe in the dark. I
love that. And before we move to our final massive
architectural story, our source material drops a couple more honorable
mentions that demonstrate how curse narratives infect both the highest
levels of politics and the most agonizing realms of sports.
Speaker 2: The Kennedys and the Cubs.
Speaker 1: First, the Kennedy Curse. The text notes the long string
of unspeakable public tragedies that followed that famous American political family,
but it specifically highlights the timeline of the assassination of
President John F.
Speaker 2: Kennedy exactly one point zero zero pm Central Standard time. Yes,
the highlighting of that exact minute is a crucial detail.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that is?
Speaker 2: Why focus on this specific time? Because trauma freezes time.
When a deeply beloved public figure is assassinated in broad daylight,
the collective consciousness of a nation stops. That minute becomes
a permanent national scar.
Speaker 1: It's the moment the world stopped making sense. And when
you have a family line marked by repeated, devastating tragedies,
we point to those frozen timestamps and call it a.
Speaker 2: Curse because the alternative is unbearable.
Speaker 1: That random, paiotic violence can strike anyone, even the most
powerful people on earth, at any time is just too
terrifying for the public to accept. We need a Kennedy
curse to explain Kennedy grief.
Speaker 2: And then we pivot to something entirely different but functionally
identical on.
Speaker 1: A wildly different note, we have the curse of the
Billygoat and baseball.
Speaker 2: A classic sports curse.
Speaker 1: The Chicago Cubs supposedly insulted a man and his pet goat,
and as a result, they didn't win a World Series
for a grueling one hundred years.
Speaker 2: The tonal contrast between the tragic assassination of a president
and a sports franchise failing to win a trophy is jarring.
Speaker 1: It is a bit whiplash inducing.
Speaker 2: Yet they serve the exact same sociological function within their
respective spheres.
Speaker 1: The billy goat story is so wonderfully petty, too, it
really is. After the Cubs lost the series to the Tigers,
the guy who owned the goat actually took the time
to send a formal telegram to the Cubs organization, asking
who stinks now?
Speaker 2: A telegram.
Speaker 1: The sheer pettiness of a curse delivered via telegram. It's amazing, yet.
Speaker 2: It ties everything we've discussed together perfectly. Whether we are
trying to process the world altering political assassination of a
national leader or trying to rationalize a century of heartbreaking
sports failures by a beloved local baseball team.
Speaker 1: We use curses to explain the inexplicable.
Speaker 2: We use them to explain the agonizing loss of our heroes,
be they political, eye cons or athletes.
Speaker 1: Okay, we have covered an incredible amount of ground today.
We've talked about cursed dolls, haunted paintings, plundered gold, bloody diamonds,
and the ghosts of Hollywood highways.
Speaker 2: We've spanned centuries and continents.
Speaker 1: But for our final segment, we are going to look
at the architecture of atonement.
Speaker 2: A fascinating concept.
Speaker 1: We are going to explore a curse that wasn't placed
by a wronged witch, an ancient civilization, or a spurned
goat owner. It was an entirely self inflicted curse that
manifested as a massive, sprawling, tangible.
Speaker 2: Physical structure, The Winchester House.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the Winchester Mystery House curse.
Speaker 2: This is perhaps the most profound psychological exploration on our
entire list today.
Speaker 1: The scale of it is just unbelievable.
Speaker 2: The Winchester Mystery House is a sprawling, utterly baffling mansion
located in California, features hundreds of rooms, literal trap doors
that drop into nothingness, maze like passages designed to confuse
and staircases, doors and windows that open up to solid
walls or sheer drops.
Speaker 1: It defies every logical rule of.
Speaker 2: Architecture, absolutely every single one.
Speaker 1: It is a towering monument to madness, and the scale
of the labor involved is just staggering. The house was
constructed by one woman, Sarah Winchester, over the course of
thirty eight relentless years.
Speaker 2: Almost four decades.
Speaker 1: Imagine that thirty eight years of NonStop, two hundred and
forty seven construction, hammer's ringing saws, cutting day and night
for decades, and the wildest part of the entire endeavor
no plans. There were no blueprints. Usually a building starts
with pairful drawings, engineering documents detailing what the finished product
will look like and ensuring it won't collapse. But the
source material notes that the builders of this mansion simply
made it up as they went along, day by day,
room by room.
Speaker 2: And the motivation behind that endless construction is the core
of the curse legend.
Speaker 1: Says Sarah Winchester believes she was deeply, irrevocably cursed. She
believed that if the sound of construction ever stopped, she
would face immediate death at the heads of spirits.
Speaker 2: We have to look at the source of her immense
wealth to understand the depths of her terror.
Speaker 1: Where did all that money come from.
Speaker 2: Her massive fortune was in her own eyes, blood money.
She had inherited it from her late husband, And that
vast fortune was earned directly from the creation and sale
of the Winchester rifle.
Speaker 1: Ah, the gun that won the West.
Speaker 2: Yes, a firearm so prevalent and lethal it was often
referred to exactly that way, which is a sterilized way
of saying it was responsible for an incalculable amount of death.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for Sarah. She's sitting
alone in a mansion on a mountain of money, and
she knows that money was built on a mountain of corpses.
Speaker 2: It means we are looking at the physical manifestation of immense, crushing,
inescapable guilt. The confusing, nonsensical layout of the mansion was
supposedly her desperate, ongoing attempt to physically confound and hide
from the vengeful ghosts of all the people killed by
Winchester rifles.
Speaker 1: She was trying to trick them.
Speaker 2: She believed these spirits stalked her every waking moment, demanding justice.
This isn't just a traditional ghost story about a haunting.
She built a physical wooden labyrinth to hide from the
blood on her family's hands.
Speaker 1: The physical weight of that guilt.
Speaker 2: The house is a sprawling monument to a deeply troubled conscience.
It entirely blurs the line between a paranormal haunting and severe,
debilitating psychological trauma, manifesting as an obsessive, compulsive building project.
Speaker 1: Thirty eight years of hammers and saws just trying to
drown out the guilt ridden voices in her head. It
is profoundly sad.
Speaker 2: It's a tragic story of isolation, and the.
Speaker 1: Source text points out that even since our passing, odd
occurrences have continually been noted to take place in the mansion.
Tour guides and visitors report hearing heavy footsteps and empty halls,
disembodied voices, seeing lights flicker without cause, hearing unexplained ghostly music, and.
Speaker 2: Sometimes even witnessing full physical manifestations of spirits.
Speaker 1: It's so fascinating to me that icons of logic, rationality
and the debunking of illusion, like the great Harry Houdini
were drawn to investigate this very house.
Speaker 2: Houdini is the perfect foil for this house.
Speaker 1: Right Houdini, a man who spent his life exposing fake
mediums and debunking the supernatural, walking through a maze built
entirely out of irrational fear and grief.
Speaker 2: Houdini's presence there is the perfect metaphor. The Winchester House
stands as the ultimate synthesis of our entire discussion today.
It shows how profound guilt, massive wealth, and the overwhelming
fear of unseen retribution can literally shape the physical world
around us, creating a monument to fear that outlasts the
person who built it.
Speaker 1: Which brings us finally to the end of our journey. Today,
let's unthread these curses. We've covered so much ground and
traversed so many centuries. We really have, from raggedy dolls
sitting on American couches to Aztec gold buried deep in
the dirt, from silver porsches speeding down the California Highway
to an endless, bizarre mansion built to trap the ghosts
of the American West.
Speaker 2: When we bring all these disparate threads together, a clear,
unified picture emerges of the vital human function that curses serve.
Speaker 1: What's the main takeaway for you.
Speaker 2: They give a tangible, narratively satisfying face to abstract bad luck.
They offer us the grim yet comforting assurance that tragedy
is not always just random, meaningless chaos, striking without reason.
Speaker 1: It gives it purpose.
Speaker 2: They tell us that sometimes tragedy is a direct consequence
of a specific action, whether it is stealing from a
sacred tomb, disrespecting human remains on a film set, or
profiting immensely from a deadly weapon. Curses assure us that
there is a cosmic scale out there actively balancing the universe.
Speaker 1: And here's a final provocative thought for you to mull
over as we sign off. We live in a modern, hyperlogical,
deeply scientific world. We carry smartphones with access to all
human knowledge in our pockets, and we build space telescopes
to peer into the origins of the universe.
Speaker 2: We are very scientifically advanced.
Speaker 1: Yet the fact that we still share these stories, that
millions of people still eagerly click on videos about haunted
eBay paintings and cursed diamonds, proves something profound about the
human condition.
Speaker 2: That we still fear the dark.
Speaker 1: It proves that humanity still harbors a deep, primal respect
and a lingering instinctual fear of the unknown. Deep down,
we want to believe the world has hidden magical rules,
even if those rules are.
Speaker 2: Completely terrifying, because a world governed by terrifying supernatural rules
is still somehow less scary than a world with no
rules at all.
Speaker 1: The unknown will always cast a long shadow over human logic,
and we will always use these ghost stories to try
and light a candle within that darkness. Now we want
to hear directly from you, the listener. Do you think
curses are real supernatural forces actively interacting with and shaping
our physical world? Or are they just the complex psychological
stories we tell ourselves to survive at chaotic, unpredictable universe.
Speaker 2: We'd love to know your thoughts.
Speaker 1: Have you ever experienced an undeniable string of cursed bad
luck in your own life that defied all logical explanation.
Leave a comment and let us know exactly where you
stand on the supernatural. Thank you so much for joining
us on this incredible dark journey here on Thrilling Threads.
We promise we have even more fascinating discoveries waiting for
you next time. Stay curious, stay safe, and we will
see you then